Former Vice President-turned-global warming activist Al Gore has been making his media rounds this week to promote his new film, An Inconvenient Sequel (which is of course the sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.) Monday night he appeared on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, where the severely anti-Trump host spent nearly the entire interview asking about the president and the election.
As is his obsession, Colbert went straight to talking about Trump and Russia, immediately after introducing Gore. As if the public hadn’t heard this story a million times before in the past two weeks alone, Colbert asked the former Vice President again what he did when he got his opponent’s stolen playbook in the 2000 election cycle. After rehashing the story Colbert asked Gore leading questions like:
“But you didn’t keep it?”
“Now, did you think about the option of keeping it, winning the election and then blaming the whole thing on the Secret Service?”
Right after that, Colbert asked Gore about meeting Putin in the 90s and what he thought about him, before finishing the Russia trifecta topic by asking about his “advice” for Hillary Clinton.
“Now you are the only other living candidate who won the popular vote and did not become President of the United States. Did you speak to Mrs. Clinton after this?” he asked.
“I did. I spoke to her after the election. She's going to be fine. The country is another matter,” Gore quipped.
“If you can, did you give her any advice on how to deal with the ridiculous situation at a certain level?” Colbert begged again.
The irony of Colbert asking one failed presidential candidate his “advice” for another failed presidential candidate didn’t seem to click with the late-night host.
After presumably tiring Gore of all the Russia talk, Colbert moved on to ask him about his climate change activism. But not before making digs at Trump for pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord.
“Does that feel like a defeat for people who are trying to educate about global warming?” he asked Gore, sympathetically. Finally he wrapped up the interview with this doomsday question about what he had to say to the “hopeless” the youth of today who fear the world will be gone in the next twenty years. “Is there hope, Al Gore?” he pleaded.
We've got to go, but the most important question I could ask is I know a lot of young people who are feeling somewhat hopeless about this and they read articles and magazines or see interviews on TV and they hear it is too late -- you know, don't even have kids because you will only help destroy the planet and there will be no future for them. Is there hope, Al Gore?
